The mother of Édouard Louis had made in spite of herself a sensational entry into literary fame with
Enfining with Eddy Bellegueule
in 2014. With her son's new book, is it time for reconciliation?
Combats et métamorphoses d'une femme
(Seuil) comes out this Thursday, seven years after a first novel which had inspired anger in this Picardy mother of five children, portrayed in an unflattering manner.
Read also: Two novels by Édouard Louis soon to be adapted into series
"
His smile highlighted his aged, yellowed skin, his voice that had become deep, hoarse, because of the cigarette, his voice too loud too
", wrote the young novelist, just after recounting his mother's miscarriage in the toilet. of a family home that she herself called "
a ruin
".
The Obs
had found her and expressed their indignation.
The quarrel between the two was public.
“
My mother reacted, she was not happy with what I had written.
The first thing she said to me when she was able to speak with me was: “why are you saying we're poor ?!”
She doesn't want the world to know about it because she feels like she's responsible
, ”the 28-year-old writer told AFP.
"
Impossible relationship
"
“
I have changed, my mother has changed.
This is the story I am telling,
”he continues.
“
The story of the relationship with my mother, like the one with my father and all my family, in my childhood was the story of an impossible relationship.
Not because we wouldn't have wanted it, not because there would have been a particular incident, but simply because I lived in a world which violently rejected homosexuality
”.
Édouard Louis is not the first to get angry with his family after having made his intimate story public.
“
Writing is the last resort when you have betrayed
”, said Jean Genet, who was abandoned by his parents and had a very difficult childhood.
Marcel Jouhandeau, in "
The Book of my father and my mother
" (1948), had described the brutal manners of his father butcher ... and his mistresses.
Faced with this tyrant, "
my holy mother's wife had a taste only for poverty and purity, love only for her children,
" he says.
And this was only the beginning of a romantic cycle on his hometown, Guéret, in the Creuse, with which he will get angry.
Hervé Bazin, who at 37 had signed a murderous portrait of his mother, "Folcoche", in
Viper in the fist
(also 1948), had definitely broken with his family when he was twenty.
To read also:
Viper in the fist
: in 1948, Hervé Bazin seen by Jean Blanzat
Closer to home, Lionel Duroy, throughout autobiographical novels, described his mother, who had nine children and whom he hated, as very unpleasant, close to madness.
Not likely to appease their relationships.
"
My mother, who never said thank you, who never smiled at us
," he wrote again in his latest novel,
L'Homme qui tremble
(2020), about this now deceased woman.
When I speak of this woman who is my mother, it is to speak of women and mothers, not of my mother in particular.
I don't write to make people happy, I write to fight and I write what feels right to me
For Édouard Louis, appeasement with this mother who, like him, changed her last name and left Picardy for Paris, counts less than literature.
“
Whether I'm on good terms with my mom or not, it's not interesting.
When I speak of this woman who is my mother, it is to speak of women and mothers, not of my mother in particular.
I don't write to make people happy, I write to fight and I write what seems right to me
, ”he says.
Likewise, after
Who killed my father
, a portrait of the worker father victim of the harshness of the factory,
Combats et métamorphoses d'une femme
paints the portrait of a malicious husband.
“
If I consider that I am trying to build a social story through a biographical experience, which would be the Balzacian stake, each character has a different face depending on the story I am going to tell.
My dad versus my mom, obviously I'm talking about a domestic tyrant, someone who wanted her to stay home and wait for him all day when she never knew when he would be home.
There are always several individuals within an individual,
”explains the novelist.
